Sunday in Outer Blogness: Publicity and Gay Rights Edition!

I was going to call this one “surprises edition” since I’ve been onvacationinItaly — hence almost everything that happened on the Internet in the past fortnight was a surprise to me yesterday (when I finally sat down and read the 1000+ blog entries in my reader). But it soon became clear that there were two main topics that almost everyone in Outer Blogness was talking about. Or is it really two? Maybe it’s just one. Impotent rage explains the connection:

everyone knows Mormons as “the homophobes who pushed Prop 8 through with some pretty underhanded methods”. For many people, that’s all they even know about who Mormons are.

Oops, time for the CoJCoL-dS’s PR department to swing into action!!! Look out for their new Ad campaign (suspiciously targeted at swing states…?). John Dehlin is thrilled to see this much diversity in the church’s new officially-approved spokesmodels. As a counterpoint, Madame Curie feels stung since this campaign represents the “false bag of goods” that got her involved in the church to begin with. Trouble is, anyonecan make these sorts of “we’re normal” ads. Even gay people, it turns out, are just like everybody else. On the plus side for the COB, television commercials are so much easier to correlate than the chaos of websites. Consider the case of Reuben Collins — one of those hip, diverse, bicycle-loving Mormons who would look great in a commercial. Unfortunately, when filling out the polygamy question on his profile, Reuben put down his own opinion instead of the official opinion, which got his profile rejected. (And I thought this PR campaign was supposed to make it look like Mormons are not a bunch of robots, remote-controlled from headquarters…?)

Or is it the whole anti-marriage-equality fiasco? For some background, Britta gives an overview of the implications for Mormons (or you can just review Betty Bowers‘ explanation). Or read Reina’s account of the personal side of this rift. Andrew criticized Chino’s headline “Young Mormons are leaving their church in droves because of prop 8,” but even if Chino’s example didn’t mention Prop 8, here’s another soon-to-resign young person who did.

I hope this comes through–I’ve left a bunch of white space at the top of the comment. I just want a virtual moment of silence for contemplating how much time it must have taken to compile this incredible list of links to all that’s going on–especially since you dealt with 1000 entries in your reader. I rely on “Sunday in Outer Blogness” to let me know what I might have missed on my own, and this edition is beyond terrific. At the risk of sounding all relief-society, you’re an example to me and I totally appreciate you!

MSP TV

Brigham Young University's Honor Code Problem:

EXMO Radio

Jake leads a discussion with Glenn, Tom, and Zack (aka “Cagelessbird” from reddit) about Zack’s interaction with several top Mesoamerican and Egyptian scholars, and their responses to his question about Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham historicity.